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review:

M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: a Historical

Construction. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, 268 pp.

LALITHA GOPALAN

As its title suggests, Madhava Prasad's book examines the ideology

of the Hindi film narrative through a combination of Frankfurt
School warnings on mass culture, Althusser's modulations on the
state apparatus, and Jameson's contribution to the ideology of form.
What obtains is a twinned history of the postcolonial Indian state and
Hindi cinema.
The book is divided into two parts: the first half focuses on the
1950s and 1960s when, Prasad argues, the films relay the coalitional
nature of the early postcolonial state (when landed elites exerted
great influence over the direction of modernization) through a
narrative form he identifies as the feudal family romance. The second
half sketches the disaggregation of this form in subsequent decades.
At the heart of the book are two chapters which splendidly engage
with Marxism and psychoanalysis to deliver one of the most brilliant
interventions in film theory using a national cinema other than
Hollywood. In 'The absolutist gaze: political structure and culture
form', Prasad argues that the feudal family romance allows us to
chart the 'competing modes of film melodrama and realism' (p. 55)
structuring the unwieldy organization of narrative elements in the
Hindi film. Evaluating the various debates that have linked realism to
democratic civil society, he suggests that the preferred model of
realism for Hindi cinema is a linear narrative that attempts to
subordinate the heterogeneous elements such as comedy tracks and
song and dance sequences. Prasad is careful to remind us that this

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thrust towards a democratic realism is never fully realized in Hindi
films which, more often than not. run into a 'belligerently egalitarian
feudalism' characterized by twists and turns in the narrative. Under
these conditions, Prasad argues Hindi film produces a supergenre,
which reasserts its dominance through narrative strategies of

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annexation whenever new subgenres emerge. Prasad refers to the
fledgling feminine genre of the melodrama as a resistant tendency
which the supergenre annexes to produce a more conventional
representation of sexual difference.
In 'Guardians of the view: the prohibition of the private*. Prasad
turns to one of the most notorious characteristics of Indian cinema -
the ban on kissing. Revisiting the received wisdom that kissing is
'western', Prasad argues that such a ban is also a prohibition of the
private and, by extension, a prohibition of cinema. Rounding off the
argument, Prasad reminds us how the implied prohibition of cinema
and modernity disavows the capitalist nature of the state by
displacing it on to a discourse on authentic traditional culture. In a
playful postscript to the chapter, Prasad interrogates the familiar
English expression 'I love you' that surfaces in Hindi films. This
declaration of love, he suggests, creates a private space for the
couple, but uttered in English it grants social privilege that flourishes
in the domain of a modernizing nation-state.
The second half of the book examines three instances of
'disaggregation' of the supergenre heralded by the crisis of state
legitimacy. Concentrating on movie star Amitabh Bachchan's films,
Prasad argues that in ZanjeerlThe Chain (Prakash Mehra, 1973),
DeewarlThe Wall (Yash Chopra, 1975), and SholaylFlames (Ramesh
Sippy, 1975) the narratives teeter between the 'semantic excess' of
the star persona on the one hand, and the role of the subaltern hero
who mobilizes the populist sentiments of the masses on the other,
but finally the star serves as 'an agent of national reconciliation and
social reform'. Tying Bachchan's stardom to those of the star
scriptwriters Salim and Javed, Prasad hints at changes in the
production conditions of the industry, but does not adequately
develop the argument which may have substantiated his claim that
'the star remained a semantic excess of the narrative process,
available for future exploitation' (p. 141). Instead of focusing on
narrative themes in this chapter, it might have been worthwhile to
see how the films domesticate the mobilization of subaltern
possibilities through spectacular slow-motion shots, fetishization of
the star body through extreme closeups, or even use the soundtrack
to amplify the star image. Attending to filmic details would have
greatly strengthened Prasad's argument that the Bachchan
phenomenon signals the arrival of populism in the national arena.
A second assault on the supergenre is directly engineered by the
state by floating the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) in 1969. Prasad
suggests that the FFC's commitment to realism, in principle, drew

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245 ' W0 Reviews
from both the progressive form available in K.A. Abbas's and Bimal
Roy's films in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as Satyajit Ray's
aesthetic project of realism ensconced within Nehruvian ideals of
nation-building. However, Prasad suggests that political imperatives
precipitated the emergence of two distinct strands of realism in FFC

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productions which, although divergent in their purpose, addressed
different interests of the citizen-subject. The first was 'new wave
cinema', heralded by Bhuvan Shome (Mrinal Sen, 1969), which
sought to counter narrative cinema and, in the process, drew attention
to the nation-state's investment with realism. Clearly, if Prasad had
fully developed this insight we should have been privy to readings of
avant-garde filmmakers such as Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahini, who
unfortunately merit only a fleeting mention in this book. Instead
Prasad reserves his critical ammunition for the second strand of
realism that obtains in middle-class cinema where the focus is on the
trials and tribulations of individual protagonists.
Within middle-class cinema, Prasad remarks on two broad
'sectors': one places the middle class in a national arena as a
hegemonic class that seals national identity and diffuses class
conflict. Here, Prasad cites Gulzar's Mere ApnelMy dear ones (1971),
and Hrishikesh Mukerjee's Anand (1971) and Namak HaramlTraitor
(1973) as examples of films that draw our attention to social issues
which are finally resolved by aesthetic and affective, instead of
political, means. The second sector reflects on the consolidation of
the middle-class identity and is further divided into three subtypes. In
the first we find films preoccupied with external intrusions such as
the lure of films threatening class reproduction; Prasad chooses
Guddi (Hrishikesh Mukerjee, 1971) and RajnigandhalTuberose (Basu
Chatterjee, 1974) to demonstrate how desires of female protagonists
upset the patriarchal equilibrium of the middle class. In the second
subtype, marital conflict over career ambitions is central to the
narrative, as in AbhimanlPride (Hrishikesh Mukerjee, 1973) and
AandhilThe storm (Gulzar, 1975). The last subtype explores the
construction of class space as a condition of bourgeois subjectivity.
Prasad proceeds to offer a fine reading of Rajinder Singh Bedi's
DastaklThe Knock (1970) by guiding us through the film's
complicated structure of voyeurism, which includes the formation of
the film spectator as a bourgeois subject obsessed with privacy.
Prasad's astute reading of Dastak more than compensates for the flat
plot summaries of the first two subtypes.
In the following chapter Prasad charts a different trajectory of
state-supported realism by providing us a fabulous, and long overdue,
analysis of Shyam Benegal's first three films - Ankur/The Seedling
(1974), NishantlNight's End (1975), and ManthanlThe Churning
(1976). He argues that, unlike the realism of Kannada cinema which
fostered regional identities, Benegal's films successfully managed to
bridge the gap between regional and national by resorting to

Screen 41:2
246 Summer 2000 • Reviews
 variations of Hindi, a scriptwriting strategy that produced 'statist
realism' or a 'developmental aesthetic' which guaranteed that the
"legal citizen-subject of the modern capitalist state is its only possible
addressee'. The full weight of these suggestions is present in
Prasad's readings of the final scenes of both Ankur and Nishant -

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films set in colonial India and hence far removed from the
postcolonial state's complicity with feudal interests. Rejecting
previous readings that see the endings of these films as being
clumsily tagged on, Prasad reads them as proffering spectacles of
rebellion without upsetting our voyeuristic interests in the feudal
mise-en-scene and, in the process, reinstating the modern nation-state
as the only viable option. Set in postcolonial India, Manthan directly
addresses the relationship among feudal interests, the state and the
rural poor, and here too Prasad finds revolutionary alternatives
blunted, this time by a good bureaucrat who stands in for the
interventionist state. Configured in different ways, the 'developmental
aesthetic' in these films bolsters a reformist, rather than radical,
agenda. There is no doubt that the fine readings of Benegal's films in
this chapter neatly fit Prasad's theoretical framework that attempts to
link the interests of the state with those of Hindi cinema, a
coincidence not easily available in his readings of other films.
The final chapter of the book returns to the concerns of the first
half by providing us with close readings of two films - Roja (Mani
Rathnam, 1992) and Damini (Rajkumar Santhoshi, 1993) - which
have no obvious intertextual relationship to each other, but which
strangely rehearse a similar problem. In both films the opening
sequence, which Prasad identifies as fragment B, threatens the
stability of the heterosexual couple in a pastoral space, through a
temporal precedence in the narrative. Prasad suggests that unlike the
heterogeneous narrative of previous years, these two films mask the
disruptions of the double narrative by threading the two together but
not without 'robbing the pastoral discourse of its fullness and self-
identity' (p. 235). Prasad warns us against viewing the unveiling of
this enforced stability of the heterosexual couple as narrative reform,
rather, he argues, there is 'supreme ideological reassurance: that there
is an Other who directs the unfolding of the new order. . . . The
Other in whom we trust when we trust in capitalism' (p. 236).
Although this closing claim is not fully substantiated, Prasad's
provocative insight will surely govern future work on contemporary
Indian films.
The theoretical and methodological innovations in this book
overshadow previous work on Indian cinema and invites readers
working on state theory, cultural studies and, of course, film theory.
At times, the critical and broad-based address of the book acts as a
handicap: since the book is keen on charting the twin histories of the
nation-state and Hindi cinema, in that particular order, it often runs
the risk of privileging the workings of state ideology over filmic

247 Screen 41:2 Summer 2000 Reviews

details. For instance, each chapter begins with a discussion of state
ideology before proceeding to the films, a stylistic device which also
has methodological and theoretical repercussions for this project:
films follow the state. It would have been interesting to see how
films govern state ideology, or even how they feed off each other, as

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suggested in Prasad's reading of Benegal's films. A related issue
arises from the book's facility with both psychoanalysis and
Marxism: the absence of pleasure. All too often the spectator's
relationship to the state and screen is cast in rational overtones that
preclude attending to the contradictory routes of pleasure. These
reservations in no way undercut Prasad's brilliant book, only demand
the strengthening of its theoretical edifice.

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